I'm sure you are all too aware of this regressive phenomenon: finding specific information about an event using a casual google search of the internet unleashes a torrent of bilge so opaque that you may as well be living in 920 AD and relying on twice yearly word of mouth.
Here is an example - I wanted to find out which television channel France vs Italy (Rugby) was being aired. Type that search into google reveals hit after hit of "Online newspaper articles" purporting to give the answer - they all seem identikit and I guess they somehow attract revenue for the paper if you click on them.
I tried the Mirror and was faced with what on the surface looks like a local online newspaper article chock full of clickbait and adverts. Its garish and casually unreadable.
I was hoping for "France vs. Italy will be aired on the BBC at 2:30pm" on the first line...but no. Parsing the text only, it does look like a standard but lazy preamble to the game and someway down through auto-streaming videos and adverts I find:
What TV channel is it on and can you live stream the match?
Live coverage of the match will be on BBC from 2:30pm with all the build-up to the crucial clash.
To stream France vs England head to the iPlayer website or app, if you are in the UK.
OK, I've seen this before - you search for a particular game and you think you've hit gold only to realise you are getting the result or report of a match between France and Kazakhstan from 2013.
So, I head over to player - go to the source, bring up the tv schedule and if its not there, head to ITV or better still a generic tv listings site.
Iplayer however now hides the scheduling link within an array of gaudy and bewildering smorgasbord of their shit programming.
What should have taken me 2 seconds, took me over a minute.
Now, this is all trite and pointless, but I think it reflects the misappropriation of the internet for big corporation revenue funnelling and, darker still, the dragging to the bottom of 'casual' users mental acumen and well-being. I say casual as a smarter internet user would not be so lazy and have already staked out and bookmarked the relevant sites that are trustworthy and informative without overloading the senses with confusion and despair.
Any thoughts on this. NB. I did not embed any adverts or insta-streaming video so that you could read my splurge undistracted.
tl;dr? your loss